The Vampire Anime With A Weird Love Story Is A Fan Classic

Let’s get one thing straight: Vampire Knight is not a good anime by any means. It somehow has a popularity ranking of #360 on My Anime List, even with a poor score of 6.86. The show is one that many young girls stumbled across when getting into anime, myself included, and while it’s not the best anime, it’s a classic at this point. 

Vampire Knight is set at Cross Academy, a school broken up into day classes for humans and night classes for vampires. The humans of the Day Class are mostly unaware that vampires also educate themselves in the same building. 

Yuki Cross is the main character of the story. She’s the adopted daughter of the headmaster and a human who happens to know about the existence of vampires because she was saved by one when he was little. Her savior’s name is Kaname Kuran, and he also happens to go to school. 

However, on the other side of the triangle, there is Zero Kiryiuu. He’s a human who also knows about vampires and has a deep hatred for them because of his experiences with vampires when he was little. While Yuki gravitates towards the vampires, Zero works hard to make her love him instead. 

Initially, the romance in Vampire Knight looks like any other love triangle. This girl has to choose between a vampire society deems as bad or her childhood friend trying to keep her safe. However, it quickly devolves from there. 

Yuki and Zero grew up together and were adopted by the same man. This means that their romance is already a little creepy, with it having step-sibling vibes surrounding it. But that wasn’t enough for this show. 

Later down the line, Yuki learns that she’s actually a vampire and is Kaname’s sister. Does this stop the romance and make them realize how ridiculous a relationship would be between them? Nope, they double down and decide that getting together with the vampire siblings is perfectly acceptable. 

In fact, it almost feels like they just needed a little incest to be able to finally make their decision. After all, Zero was still perfectly in the running until the big reveal. 

REVIEW SCORE

I watched many weird shows when I was little, desperate to get my hands on any anime I could find, regardless of the theme. There were some questionable ones in there that I can’t believe I ever watched all the way through, but Vampire Knight was something far above the others. 

Even years after watching, I can easily recall this series and its strange incestuous themes. Is this a show I would ever recommend to anyone? Absolutely not, but it is one that I feel people need to watch to understand fully. 

If you want to see for yourself why Vampire Knight is a classic, if not completely creepy, anime, you can watch it for yourself on Crunchyroll or Hulu.